Comparison of welding residual stress and deformation induced by local vacuum electron beam welding and metal active gas arc welding in a stainless steel thick-plate joint

Abstract

Local vacuum electron beam welding (LVEBW) breaks through the limit of vacuum chamber and can be flexibly proceeded in more working conditions. Using LVEBW to substitute conventional gas metal arc welding will greatly improve production efficiency. In view of the severe effect of welding residual stress (WRS) on product safety, the WRS induced by two methods should be comprehensively evaluated, thus for providing the designer and engineer with a theoretical basis and guidance to control the WRS in thick-plate joint. This paper investigated the WRS and deformation induced by LVEBW and metal active gas arc welding (MAG) in SUS310S thick-plate joint via numerical simulation and experiment. Based the simulation and experiment results, the WRS and deformation induced by the LVEBW and MAG were compared quantitatively. Results show that the distribution of WRS induced by two methods are significantly different. The high longitudinal residual stress (RS) region in LVEBW joint is much narrower than that in MAG joint and the maximum transverse RS in LVEBW joint is smaller than that in MAG joint. Both the transverse shrinkage and out-of-plane deformation induced by LVEBW is far less than that induced by MAG. Meanwhile, LVEBW has a great efficiency advantage over MAG.

Keywords

• Local vacuum electron beam welding
• Metal active gas arc welding
• Thick plate
• Finite element method
• Welding residual stress
• Welding deformation